Towards Green Business Process Management

Abstract

There is a global consensus on the need to reduce our collective carbon footprint. While much research attention has focused on developing alternative energy sources, automotive technologies or waste disposal techniques, we often ignore the fact that the ability to optimize (existing) operations to reduce their emissions impact is fundamental to this exercise. We believe that by transforming the problem into the domain of Business Process Management (BPM) we can leverage the rich expertise in this field to address issues associated with identifying areas for improvement, understanding the implication and performing carbon footprint minimization. We will use the term "Green BPM" to describe a novel class of technologies that leverage and extend existing BPM technology to enable process design, analysis, execution and monitoring in a manner informed by the carbon footprint of process designs and instances. This article describes the first steps in the development of this class of technologies.

Exploring the economic value of a cloud computing solution and its contribution to green IT

“…This makes it interesting for companies to adopt for various businessoriented reasons. Besides that, cloud-based services add additional value that is rarely considered in current research and practice: cloud computing as a business model providing optimised business processes and services has a lot of potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and thus serve as an energy-efficient solution that contributes to the idea of green IT (Scott and Watson, 2012;Hoesch-Klohe et al, 2010). However, the potential associated with this idea is far from being exhausted (Tenhunen and Penttinen, 2010;The Boston Consulting Group, 2011).…”

Strategic Alignment of Business Processes

“…Accumulation of effects and QoS values have been discussed in previous work [95,98,115,148] and previously in §3.4.1, the result of which is a consistent set of effects and QoS values that give a semantic meaning to a process model. An accumulation function accumulate takes as input a trace σ and returns a tuple Υ, ε,Γ which are the set of cumulative QoS values, the set of cumulative effects and the cumulative customer state respectively.…”

“…We leverage and build on the work of Hoesch-Klohe's et. al., framework Abnoba [98], which can be used to annotate QoS capabilities υ to activities in a process model. These activities can then be pairwise accumulated, to show capabilities for the process.…”

Towards Energy-aware Optimisation of Business Processes

“…Dealing with time-dependent energy costs has been mainly studied in the context of household management (Gottwalt et al, 2011), and business process management has been mostly neglected. An exception is the proposal of Hoesch-Klohe et al (2010) in which resources are annotated with CO 2 consumption details, which are known to the process manager that aggregates the energy costs. This paper considers allocation and optimisation of resources in business processes while taking into account energy costs.…”